The History of Israel has always been
conditioned by the weight of the Old Testament in that the latter, with its complex
editorial character and its quite special theological value, is practically the only
source. After a long phase during which stories about Israel took shape as a redactional
post-canonical stratum, and after research into archaeological and philological parallels
in the surrounding Near East with a view to drawing up an enormous hypertext, modern
research seemed to have rightly settled for a kind of "proto-historical" use of
archaeological documentation connected with distribution of textual data according to
periods of redaction or reworking. Moreover, recent tendencies of a
"post-modern" type, implicitly or explicitly denying the existence of a real
referent for the historiographic account, are likely to exhaust once again the historical
reconstruction of the biblical text at the level of criticism (ideological, literary,
theological or other).